1269 Arts and sciences poems

It came with those scratches from all their belt buckles, palm-dark with their sweat like the stock of a gun: an arc of pickmarks cut clear through the lacquer where all the players before me once strummed—once thumbed these same latches where it sleeps in green velvet. Once sang, as I sing, the old songs. There’s no end, there’s no end to this world, everlasting. We crumble to dust in its arms.

In nyc , we stalked fishes in filets of sounds: delivery engines & ashy doors clapping shut, vendors knuckling fin & silhouette- shaped words into salty expectations. My daughter & I walked down a couple of  slim-bricked blocks that smelled like snapper & afro sheen with no afros in sight. On snaggletoothed streets, we double-took the wet alleys where things jumped off the hook like smart seafood before lunch. We parted the perfect & abundantly wintered streets. My daughter said,I know these parts

This admirable gadget, when it is Wound on a string and spun with steady force, Maintains its balance on most any smooth Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes. It is whirled not on a constant course, but still Stands in unshivering integrity For quite some time, meaning nothing perhaps But being something agreeable to watch, A silver nearly silence gleaning a still- ness out of speed, composing unity From spin, so that its hollow spaces seem Solids of light, until it wobbles and Begins to whine, and then with an odd lunge Eccentric and reckless, it skids away And drops dead into its own skeleton.

Scott Helmes is a longtime visual poet who has produced works in a variety of forms, including mathematical poetry and rubber-stamped poetry. His "haiku #62" is part of a series of striking poems created from scraps of colored text torn out of glossy magazines and arrayed in three tiers. These tiers approximate the look of haiku, and the text flutters in and out of different colors and typefaces, giving the poems their ineffable beauty.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright, Taunter of the ultra right, What blink of the Buddha’s eye Chose the day for you to die? Queer pied piper, howling wild, Mantra-minded flower child, Queen of Maytime, misrule’s lord Bawling,Drop out! All aboard! Finger-cymbaled, chanting Om, Foe of fascist, bane of bomb, Proper poets’ thorn-in-side, Turner of a whole time’s tide, Who can fill your sloppy shoes? What a catch for Death. We lose Glee and sweetness, freaky light, Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright.

Among other things, thanks for explaining how the generous death of old trees forms the red powdered floor of the forest.

"The trees are mended." A shy man seeks perfection in his art: Across vast acres, color and shape of tidiness, Iowa's unruly grass submits, blade by blade. The blue of Mother's dishes tints the sky. Across vast acres, color and shape of tidiness, sloping rows and rectangles piece a new land. The blue of Mother's dishes tints the sky. Like a black quilt tied with loops of green, sloping rows and rectangles piece the new land. The reassuring fields of corn unfold like black quilts tied with loops of green. Under the artist's alchemy, the reassuring fields of corn unfold. Sweet clouds hover like the hands of God. Under the artist's alchemy, even winter's leaden skies grow bright. Sweet clouds hover like the hands of God as the Thirties' skylines and bread lines disappear. Even winter's leaden skies grow bright. A yellow hill rises, like the belly of a woman ripe with child, as the skylines and bread lines disappear. Iowa's unruly grass submits, blade by blade, a yellow hill rises— and the shy man finds perfection in his art.

The streets are my body or rather the wish of the skin to put on the grass in a gold rain not vice-versa, the lips twisting to allow the tongue to play in the broken mirror on the floor Catches an arm a distance the light at the ceiling This kills the lift begged of a magical hand I have walked a long way traced in these pieces an arm a crotch     The queen of faerie guarded by blue-winged griffins Untouched by

“Who is Apollo?” College student How shall a generation know its story If it will know no other? When, among The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever, Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard, For all to see, the Streptococcus chain. His mind was like Odysseus and Plato Exploring a new cosmos in the old As if he wrote a poem—his enemy Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground His introspection. “Science and peace,” he said, “Will win out over ignorance and war,” But then, the virus mutant in his vein, “Death to the Prussian!” and “revenge, revenge!” How shall my generation tell its story? Their fathers jobless, boys for the CCC And NYA , the future like a stairwell To floors without a window or a door, And then the army: bayonet drill and foxhole; Bombing to rubble cities with textbook names Later to bulldoze streets for; their green bodies Drowned in the greener surfs of rumored France. My childhood friend, George Humphreys, whom I still see Still ten years old, his uncombed hair and grin Moment by moment in the Hürtgen dark Until the one step full in the sniper’s sight, His pastor father emptied by the grief. Clark Harrison, at nineteen a survivor, Never to walk or have a child or be A senator or governor. Herr Wegner, Who led his little troop, their standards high And sabers drawn, against a panzer corps, Emerging from among the shades at Dachau Stacked like firewood for someone else to burn; And Gerd Radomski, listening to broadcasts Of names, a yearlong babel of the missing, To find his wife and children. Then they came home, Near middle age at twenty-two, to find A new reunion of the church and state, Cynical Constantines who need no name, Domestic tranquility beaten to a sword, Sons wasted by another lie in Asia, Or Strangeloves they had feared that August day; And they like runners, stung, behind a flag, Running within a circle, bereft of joy. Hearing of the disaster at Sedan And the retreat worse than the one from Moscow, Their son among the missing or the dead, Pasteur and his wife Mary hired a carriage And, traveling to the east where he might try His way to Paris, stopping to ask each youth And comfort every orphan of the state’s Irascibility, found him at last And, unsurprised, embraced and took him in. Two wars later, the Prussian, once again The son of Mars, in Paris, Joseph Meister— The first boy cured of rabies, now the keeper Of Pasteur’s mausoleum—when commanded To open it for them, though over seventy, Lest he betray the master, took his life. I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies, Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight, Teaching his daughter to use a microscope And musing through a wonder—sacred passion, Practice and metaphysic all the same. And, each year, honor three births: Valéry, Humbling his pride by trying to write well, Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention Repeatedly outside the reach of pride, And him whose mark I witness as a trust. Others he saves but could not save himself— Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit Fastened by love upon the human cross.

Compose for Red a proper verse; Adhere to foot and strict iamb; Control the burst of angry words Or they might boil and break the dam. Or they might boil and overflow And drench me, drown me, drive me mad. So swear no oath, so shed no tear, And sing no song blue Baptist sad. Evoke no image, stir no flame, And spin no yarn across the air. Make empty anglo tea lace words— Make them dead white and dry bone bare. Compose a verse for Malcolm man, And make it rime and make it prim. The verse will die—as all men do— but not the memory of him! Death might come singing sweet like C, Or knocking like the old folk say, The moon and stars may pass away, But not the anger of that day.